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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

Tangential, but seeing friend and family adopt dogs and basically pampering them as much as they would a child I've been wondering if in 2023 a lot of people aren't using dogs as a cheaper stand-in for kids in areas where the cost of living make actual children cost prohibitive.

I don't know about the situation in NYC, but in Vancouver it's interesting how you nearly never encounter people with children, but you will see a lot more dogs. Could be an interesting correlation to study.

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I've heard a few of my millennial peers say, "Plants are the new pets, and pets are the new children."

I agree it's definitely caused in part by the high costs of raising kids. Reaching enough financial and personal stability to have children can feel unattainable. Even reaching enough stability to have a dog isn't always easy: pet friendly places usually cost more (some even charge monthly "pet rent"), you need enough space for the dog to move, you need the time to walk the dog or the money to pay for it, etc.

I think these people are deluding themselves. Sure, dogs may cost a little less than kids in money, but not in time. Dogs severely hamper your lifestyle unless you work at home and don't leave the house much. Kids hamper your lifestyle for about 2 years, and then it eases up as they become more independent, but dogs never get to that point. Worse, there's a lot of things you frequently can't do at all with a dog, that you can with a kid, such as going shopping, going on a foreign vacation, etc.

I believe it. For various reasons my wife and I haven’t had children yet. We’re urban DINKs with combined gross income at nearly half a million per year. We have a 3 month old puppy and he is our baby.

I recommend getting dog(s) and kids - a very fun, life changing combo. You won’t regret.

We plan to, but life worked out this way so far. We’re still in our early 30s, and having the financial capability to thrive with children is very recent. We’re both rapidly progressing our careers so it’s hard to find the right time to shift direction. We’ve been together for a decade but most of that decade has been grad school, paying off student debt, paying lots of rent on entry level salaries, and so on :)

At 35 your ability to reproduce and have a healthy kid starts dropping. At 45, you are looking at IVF.

The recommendation is at least 18 months between kids so that the mother can recover.

Most people don't get pregnant the way your highschool threatened you would. It can take a year or two.

It can absolutely happen right away though - there’s no way to tell for sure until you try. Our kid #1 (both aged 33) was first month of trying, kid #2 (both aged 36) took 3 months.

Most of our friends took longer, but another same-age couple had a similar experience to us.

So go in with low expectations, but don’t try before you’re ready.

“Geriatric pregnancy” is a term that is sometimes used to describe a pregnancy in a woman 35 or older. It’s best, from a biological standpoint, for a woman to have all of her kids before age 35. I don’t think most people understand this or talk about it enough.

Yep. It’s especially difficult for my wife. She finished grad school at 28, and her industry is almost entirely within high CoL cities. We had wanted kids by 30, but when 30 rolled around it was a pandemic and we were locked in a 1000sqft apartment with my mother in law, and my wife was still new in her career and worried that if she took a break from her career it would mean never going back to it.

We’re in a place now that we can actually plan it out but as you mention, our time is low on the children front. There’s just very few sweet spots between “full career” and “no career” for women in some fields, especially if your childbearing dream includes taking a year or two off work.

Counter opinion: I regret getting a dog. Bad timing. It was around the time my second child was born. We are not succeeding at giving him the attention he requires because obviously the kids are the priority. He demonstrates his dissatisfaction by pissing on the stairs every other day. Pity, since you can tell he's a cool dog, just frustrated.

One of the reasons I rushed to get a puppy when we realized we were at least 6+ months out from any pregnancy is because I want my puppy to be fully grown and calmed down by the time we need to pour all our attention onto a newborn.

Puppies are actually nuts and are very needy. If I get another dog it’ll probably be when my future human children get to school age

If your puppy could talk I wonder what he'd say about that.

The issue now is that the employment laws are so nasty in places like NYC that a scammy nanny can financially wipe you out with zero evidence. That doesn't happen with a dog.

I live in NYC and have heard this cited as a concern precisely zero times. Besides, a ton of people use daycares, not nannies.

Laws just changed. This will become more common. Similar to how NYC paid out 500m to a collection of some legit and many scammy 'police misconduct' lawsuits.

Dogs are the new kids and plants are the new dogs.

I think this is actually a big part of it, we are seeing more and more people replace children with pets, and I think it is a long term major mistake.

I don’t think you’re wrong, but both the causes and consequences are born at the societal level so there’s a tragedy of the commons happening (where “the commons” is having a stable population I suppose)

There's even an acronym for this. DINKWAD -- with a dog.

I’ve heard “fur baby” which is similar

> in Vancouver it's interesting how you nearly never encounter people with children

Well, observation bias is a factor. You don't encounter the people with kids when they're busy at home with their kids.

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